The ASML MATCH Act export controls debate landed in Washington this week in the form of a Dutch trade minister, a round of congressional meetings, and a quietly pointed warning: the bill could cause serious damage to Europe’s most valuable company. Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma travelled to Washington to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress, urging them to reconsider the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act. ‘It’s exceptional that I’m coming here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress,’ Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg after the meetings. ‘The stakes for the Netherlands may be…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
The Facebook Creator Studio app is being reimagined as a stand-alone AI companion, Meta announced Wednesday, rebuilt from the ground up to help creators grow their audiences without ever leaving Facebook. The move is a direct play to keep creators loyal on the platform as it competes for their time and output against TikTok and YouTube. The original Creator Studio tool was shuttered in 2023 before Meta revived it in this new AI-powered form. Consider that a hint at how seriously the company is now taking the creator side of its business. What the Facebook Creator Studio App Actually Does…
The Zoox robotaxi upgrades announced this week are, by design, the kind of thing most passengers will only notice once they stop noticing them. Amazon’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary has refreshed the interior and exterior of its custom-built robotaxi ahead of a hoped-for commercial service launch later this year, with changes ranging from ergonomic seat padding to enlarged cupholders. There is, as ever, a rather large regulatory asterisk attached to that timeline. What’s Changed Inside and Out The fundamentals remain intact. The cube-shaped vehicle still has no steering wheel, still drives bidirectionally with four-wheel steering, carries four passengers, and can reach…
Two of the more candid voices in early-stage AI sat down last week to walk through their AI startup investing strategy, and neither of them made it sound remotely straightforward. Carter Reum, co-founder of M13, and Chang Xu, a partner at Basis Set Ventures, appeared at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in El Segundo, Los Angeles. M13 manages $2.5 billion in assets and has backed 17 unicorns at seed or Series A. Basis Set launched in 2017 as one of the first early-stage funds focused exclusively on AI and recently closed its fourth fund at $250 million, up from $185 million for…
Flipkart Minutes quick commerce network has hit 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres less than two years after launch, with Walmart’s Indian arm targeting 1,500 by the end of 2026, and it has Amazon breathing down its neck the entire way.The milestone was announced Wednesday. Orders on the platform have grown about 400% year-on-year, according to Kunal Gupta, head of Flipkart Minutes, who spoke to TechCrunch. Entrackr, citing the company separately, puts that figure at 5x, or 500%; the lower figure comes from Gupta directly. Customer retention is up 20% year-on-year, the company said.Gen Z is a big part of the story. The…
Anthropic’s Claude Tag Slack integration is now in research preview, positioning itself as a persistent AI teammate that lives inside your workspace, accumulates context, and acts more like a colleague than a chatbot. The pitch is familiar; the execution is a step further than what Slack’s existing AI tools have attempted. How the Claude Tag Slack Integration Actually Works Users already had ways to invoke Claude inside Slack: direct messages, channel @mentions for on-demand help, and Claude Code in Slack for routing coding tasks to full sessions on the web. Claude Tag replaces the existing Claude in Slack application entirely,…
The LastPass Klue data breach has exposed customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and customer support case records, the password manager maker has confirmed, though LastPass says its own infrastructure and password vaults were not touched. The breach did not originate at LastPass. It originated at Klue, a market research and competitive intelligence firm headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. Klue CEO Jason Smith disclosed that attackers were identified inside Klue’s systems on 12 June. So: a vendor your password manager used for sales intelligence suffered a breach, and now your contact details and support ticket history are in…
AI tech layoffs in 2026 are accelerating faster than most forecasters expected, and Oracle just put the sharpest number yet on the trend: 21,000 jobs cut over the past 12 months, a 13% reduction in its global workforce, disclosed in its June 22 annual regulatory filing. The company stated plainly that ‘the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.’ Not a rumour, not a leak. A line in a financial filing. The twist is that Oracle is also booming. Oracle IR reported fiscal year 2025 total…
The Mach Industries Series C closed on 2 June 2026, raising $300 million and valuing the defence startup at $1.8 billion, roughly four times where it stood when it raised $100 million at a $470 million valuation in June 2025, according to TechCrunch’s Series C report. The round was led by Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, with Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Khosla Ventures also participating. Total funding now stands at roughly $485 million. For a company that started with a hydrogen-powered prototype built from Home Depot and Amazon parts, that’s a lot of runway to justify. Six programmes, zero…
The Anthropic export control ban arrived at 5:21 PM ET on 12 June, when the Commerce Department sent a letter to CEO Dario Amodei invoking national security authorities to bar all foreign nationals from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the company’s two most advanced AI models. The directive applied not just to users abroad but to foreign nationals inside the United States, including Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees. Faced with no practical way to screen every user, Anthropic pulled the models entirely. The immediate trigger, according to multiple reports, was Amazon. Reuters reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was among…